The former NSA employee - a man in military service in the US for a decade - has revealed himself in an interview with The Guardian. "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things [...] I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under." He did it out of a sense of civic duty. He's in Hong Kong, and doesn't expect to ever see home again. Poor guy.

Let me just say I have some knowledge about homeland security DPI systems (outside of the U.S) - how they are being used and why and non of them, to be best of the knowledge, was ever used to spy in Joe-Six-Pack.

Most people fear that the "government" will abuse the information it has about you (assuming it actually keeps a complete record about each and every citizen - something that I doubt, greatly) but care little about what Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Twitter/Myspace/etc are doing with the *same* (or actually, more) information.
You somehow assume that your future political opponents will have complete access to the NSA super-duper-secret vault, but won't be able to bribe some stupid schmuck at your local social-web-site-operator-X and/or your ISP to get all the juicy details about you.

If you want real privacy, I would suggest you stop using electronic communications, period. Everything else, is more-or-less like using Tor to surf facebook...

As for J. Edgar Hoover - well, you more or less just proved why you *don't* need the NSA super-secret DB to get all the dirt about more-or-less everyone....